Swan grimaced. He had live ammunition and no ready target. Then he grinned. A time would come.

I said, “Murgen?”

“There isn’t much more. Baladitya says most of the high points of the mythology agree. There’s more of a death goddess to her nature over there. She’s always referenced as living in a cemetery.”

“She does that here, doesn’t she?” I asked. “When Sleepy and Lady and you, especially, talk about your nightmares, that place you go with all the bones? That could be a Gunni style cemetery.”

The Gunni burn their dead to purify them before their souls line up for reassignment in the next life. But the fires are never hot enough to consume the major bones. If a burning ground is near a major river the leftovers are generally deposited there. But a lot of places are not near a major river. And some are not near a source of firewood. And some families never save up enough to buy wood that is available.

Bones pile up.

These places are not often seen by anyone but the priests who attend them, the men in yellow who revere Majayama but watch over their shoulders because Kina and her pack of pet demons supposedly lived beneath the bone piles. Even though Kina is known to be chained up under the glittering plain until the Year of the Skulls.

I said, “I’ve got a lot of time to think these days. One of the things I’ve been pondering is why there are so many different stories about Kina. And I think I’ve figured it out.”

My ego got a boost. Even Sleepy seemed interested, despite herself. My wife, perhaps less enthralled, suggested, “Do go on,” in a tone implying that she knew there would be no stopping me anyway.

“In those days the Company...”

“Croaker!”

“Sorry. Just seeing if you were listening. What clued me was the fact that there isn’t any uniform Gunni doctrine. There isn’t much of an hierarchy amongst Gunni priests, either, except locally. There’s no central arbiter of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable dogma. Kina isn’t alone in being the subject of a hundred conflicting myths. The whole pantheon is. Pick any god you want. When you travel from village to village you’ll find him wearing different names, different myths, getting mixed up with other gods, and on and on and on. We see the confusion because we’re travelers. But up until the Shadowmaster wars almost nobody in these parts ever went anywhere. Generation after generation, century after century, people were born, lived and died in the same few square miles. You only had a few gem traders and the Strangler bands moving around. Ideas didn’t travel with them. So every myth gradually mutates according to local experience and prejudice. Now first the Shadowmasters and then we land in the middle of all this...”

We? A glance around showed me just three other people who had not grown up in this end of the world. For a moment I felt ancient and out of place and found myself recalling an old piece of poetry that said something to the effect: “Soldiers live. And wonder why.” Meaning, why am I the one, of all those who marched with the Company when I was young, who is still alive and kicking? I do not deserve it any more than any of those men. Maybe less than some.

You always feel a little guilty when you think about it. And a little glad it was somebody else, not you.

“That’s it. We’re travelers. That’s why it all seems alien and contradictory. Wherever we are, most of us are outsiders. Even when we do belong to the majority religion.” A glance around showed me that hardly any of my audience were Gunni, either. “Well, that’s my piece.”

“All right, then,” Sleepy said. “Back to practical problems. How do we deal with the Daughter of Night and the Goblin thing?”

“That’s practically the same thing as a skinwalker,” Suvrin said. “Kina put him on like a suit of clothes.” Suvrin had skinwalkers on the brain tonight.

“The Daughter of Night!” Sleepy snapped. “I want to hear about the Daughter of Night. Not about Kina. Not about skinwalkers. Not about old Voroshk sorcerers, not about old librarians and not about anything else. And, Lady, if you really don’t want the girl killed, then come up with an idea for disarming her that’s better than any idea for taking her out. Because you’re the only one here letting emotion get in the way.”

Goblin and the girl both rode, though their mounts remained skittish and frightened and Goblin’s had to be kept in blinders so that it could not see its rider. Neither animal was allowed to look back. Goblin himself wore a rag to protect his damaged but nearly healing eyes.

The handful of soldiers who joined their flight from the middle ground fell away rapidly. Driven by the “love me” spell they gave it everything they had but eventually every man drifted outside the spell’s influence, then vanished immediately.

Only the two touched by Kina crossed the bridge at Ghoja. They reached the north bank as dawn began to paint the eastern sky. It was still only the morning after the destruction of the Taglian Middle Army. They had killed several post horses but even so had not arrived ahead of rumors of the disaster to Taglian arms.

“Our enemies have been here before us,” the Goblin-thing said. He wanted to be called Khadidas, Slave of Khadi. The girl simply refused to address him by that appellation. “These people have been warned and threatened but they will raise no hand against you because of who they think you are.” Not because of who she was.

The Daughter of Night played Protector with a blend of arrogance and small-mindedness nothing like her aunt’s but the garrison commanders found her sufficiently convincing. And she ached every second because it was clear that these unbelievers would never yield themselves to the service of the Dark Mother. She knew that they would have tried to destroy her had they known she was not her aunt. This world deserved the Year of Skulls.

The aura the girl radiated got her through her brief confrontations.

“I’m exhausted,” she whined to Goblin. “I’m not used to riding.”

“We can’t stop here.”

“I can’t go on.”

“You will go on. Until you are safe.” The Khadidas’s voice left no doubt who it believed to be in charge. “There is a holy place not many leagues further. We’ll go there.”

“The Grove of Doom.” There was no enthusiasm in the girl’s response. “I don’t want to go there. I don’t like that place.”

“We will be stronger there.”

“It’ll be the first place they’ll look for us. If they don’t already have soldiers there waiting.” She knew that was unlikely. Those people were not yet prepared to tell their soldiers that the woman inside the black leather was not the Protector anymore, but they did have the capacity to move their game pieces from afar. They seemed able to thwart the Goddess whenever they liked.

She said, “They already know what we’re going to do. Because we just talked about it.”

“We’re going to the Grove. I will be much stronger there.” No argument would be allowed.

The Daughter of Night was no less devoted to her spiritual mother today but she did not like this creature who bore a fragment of Kina inside him. She found it difficult to articulate even to herself, but she missed Narayan. She missed him because he had loved her. And she, in her self-centered way, had loved him enough in return that now her life was one ongoing trail of loneliness and desolation... leading where? This new hand of the Goddess seemed incapable of any emotion but anger. And he refused flatly to indulge her in any way, or even to acknowledge her humanity.

She was a tool. That she was a living thing with wants and emotions all her own was just an annoyance, a nuisance, an inconvenience. There was an ever stronger implication that she should learn to abandon her distractive qualities. Or else.